At Wyche, Burgess, Freeman, & Parham. P.A., IT Director Tom Crowe faced a complex and expensive iManage upgrade in order to achieve the new capabilities it needed. Concerned about the complexity and cost, Crowe began considering other alternatives – and discovered Worldox. We’ll let him tell the story himself:

“I first started looking at options when it came time to upgrade iManage from 7.5 to 8.0.When I started looking into everything that was involved in the upgrade, I realized I would be more or less starting over with iManage.

“My experience with iManage hadn't been particularly unpleasant, but I always had this feeling that we were paying too much, and the system was way too complex for the number of documents and amount of users we had. The upgrade from 5.x to 7.5 wasn't particularly easy, and the application integration was complex to say the least. The 8.0 upgrade was daunting.

“I started talking with other Lawnet (now ILTA) participants, and tried to get some cost estimates for the move to matter-centricity in iManage 8.0.In this discovery process, I found that iManage 8.0 would require its own SQL-based database server. At the time, we were running a single SQL server for our accounting, timekeeping and iManage databases. The backend for iManage 8.0 was so taxing that it would require its own server to perform at an acceptable level. (We were already running in a "two-tier" mode where our files were stored on a dedicated file server.)

“I added in the pricing for a new server, and the requisite licensing to the upgrade. I then started looking into consultants to help with the migration. Some conservative estimates from others were 50 hours of consultant time for the upgrade – with some saying much, much higher. Once these totals started inching higher and higher, I decided I needed to see what else was available on the market. Maybe there was a better solution.”

“Fortunately, the LawNet '05 conference was nearing. At the conference I met Tom Burke, President of Worldox, and we started discussing my options and pricing and feasibility of a migration. With that knowledge under my belt, I looked into Worldox GX more closely, and got some opinions from others that were using GX. The satisfaction with GX was overwhelming.

“I then started a cost estimate for the upgrade vs. the migration, which included not only costs for that year, but costs for the following 3 years. The upgrade vs. migration costs were almost identical. I then compared maintenance costs over the next 3 years, and that's where the difference really showed up. My maintenance costs for GX would be half what I was paying iManage for the same number of users.”

“I took my numbers and started "selling" a GX migration to my committees. There was indeed skepticism, at first. Then, they saw Worldox GX in a web demo. It was easy to get them to buy in after that. After a little more work with users concerned about change, we moved forward with our migration plans.”

“It's been a little over a year, and what can I say? My users have been very happy. And, being the sole administrator, I can definitely sing GX's praises. The administrative side is maybe 1/5 of what I spent on iManage. It just works.

“Would I do it again? No. I'd have started with Worldox in 2000 and skipped iManage altogether.”